July 7th, 2011
July 7th: What’s up in Planetary Exploration in July 2011
Date: July 7, 2011 Title: What's up in Planetary Exploration in July 2011 Podcaster: Emily Lakdawalla Organization: The Planetary Society Link: The Planetary Society Blog Description: Emily Lakdawalla keeps an eye on the robots that are exploring our solar system for the Planetary Society blog. Today she takes a look at what we can expect from the planets, moons, and other stuff during the third quarter of 2011, July, August, and September. Bio: Emily Lakdawalla is a planetary geologist and writer who works for the world's largest space interest group, The Planetary Society, as its blogger, web writer, and contributor to the weekly Planetary Radio podcast. She is also a contributing editor for Sky & Telescope magazine. She lives in Los Angeles with a 3-year-old who can list all the planets for you, a new baby who has yet to learn their names, and a husband who likes to pretend he doesn't know anything about space. Sponsor: Today's podcast is sponsored by Omnologos Ltd, on its quest to find sponsors for a major scientific experiment on the International Space Station. And it is dedicated to Lorenzo: may you take me to the Moon, one day! Transcript: What's up in planetary exploration in July 2011 I'm Emily Lakdawalla and I keep an eye on the robots that are exploring our solar system for the Planetary Society blog. Today I'm going to take a look at what we can expect from the planets, moons, and other stuff during the third quarter of 2011, July, August, and September. Atlantis' final launch this week will mark the end of the shuttle program, and people often ask me what I think about the end of the space program. I find this question incredibly irritating because we are actually living right now in the greatest age of solar system exploration ever. We have nine spacecraft actively gathering scientific data from orbit at four planets, the Moon, and the asteroid Vesta. Another nine spacecraft are on their way to future missions or headed out of the solar system entirely. There are five more that will launch before the year is over. And I'm not even counting all the dozens of missions observing the Sun or the Earth or the rest of the universe beyond our tiny backwater stellar system. Let me give you the rundown on what all these spacecraft are doing. Last time I rounded up these missions, in March, I went from the middle of the solar system out, so to change things up this time I'll go from the outside in. That lets me start with what's arguably my favorite mission of all, Voyager. Both Voyager spacecraft are headed right out of the solar system. They've passed beyond the termination shock, where the solar wind slams into the interstellar medium and slows down; they're now in the heliosheath, the last zone of space that's under the direct influence of our Sun. Their cameras were shut off a long time ago but their magnetometers and particle sensors are still working, and they're telling us that the heliosheath is a roiling sea of humongous and frothy magnetic bubbles shaped like sausages. No matter where they go, the Voyagers show the solar system to be a much stranger place than scientists ever imagined. Moving inward, we cross the orbits of Pluto and Neptune and then get to New Horizons, which is patiently cruising toward Pluto. It crossed the orbit of Uranus in March. The outer solar system has vast empty spaces; it won't pass the orbit of Neptune until August 2014, just before it begins observing Pluto in January 2015. From New Horizons we zoom past the orbit of Uranus to get to Saturn and its rings and huge family of moons. Cassini has been active there for seven years now, and is just as busy as ever. This summer it will be taking lots of pictures of Saturn's northern hemisphere to study a gargantuan storm that flared up there late last year. Cassini's orbit changes with time; sometimes it flies high over Saturn and sometimes its orbit is in the same plane as Saturn's rings and moons. Look for some great shots of the sponge-shaped moon Hyperion and of a tiny moon discovered by Cassini called Pallene. The quiet summer will give way to a very exciting October for Cassini, which will contain two very very close flybys of the geyser moon, Enceladus. Moving in from Saturn, we'll cross Jupiter's orbit and get to the European Rosetta mission. Last month Rosetta was put into hibernation, as it's so far from the Sun now that its solar panels can't provide enough power to keep it awake. It won't wake or talk to Earth again until January 2014. Inward from Jupiter is the asteroid belt, and Dawn. This month Dawn will finally reach orbit at the first of its two asteroid targets. Vesta is the second-largest of the asteroids, a much bigger one than has ever been visited by a spacecraft before. I think it's really exciting to see Vesta slowly coming into focus -- it's a whole huge world that no human has ever seen before. Dawn is already sending back images that are sharper than anything we've seen from Earth or even Hubble. The pictures are still fuzzy but they show a world that has been massively battered, with irregular outlines and deep craters. That pretty much clinches the diagnosis that Vesta does not meet the criteria required for it to be called a dwarf planet; it doesn't have enough gravity to pull its impact-battered ridges and mountains downward and smooth them out into a rounder shape. Dawn's going to spend a year at Vesta; throughout the summer it will be getting steadily closer, settling into a survey orbit at an altitude of 2700 kilometers in August. I'll be posting lots of Dawn's pictures of Vesta on my blog. Moving in from the asteroid belt, we get to Mars, which now has four spacecraft exploring it. Spirit was officially declared deceased two months ago but Opportunity is carrying the torch for her. This summer Opportunity will finally complete a journey that's taken her three years and covered almost 20 kilometers, from Victoria crater to the rim of a huge crater called Endeavour. What's taking her to Endeavour is some mineral signatures that they spotted from space, minerals that might have formed during a warmer, wetter time on Mars. Spirit is done climbing Martian mountains, but Opportunity is about to begin. Three orbiters continuously fly over Opportunity. They are Mars Odyssey, Mars Express, and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. I don't have much news about these missions, but that's newsworthy in itself; every day that these three ships continue to operate normally expands the richness of what we know about Mars. And for all the photographs that they've taken, they haven't yet covered all of Mars at their maximum resolution -- not by a long shot -- so it's worth it for them to keep on with their steady work. At the Moon, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has now delivered more data about the Moon to Earth than has ever been sent back by all other deep-space missions combined. Yet, just like with Mars, there's still a lot of the Moon to cover at better and better resolution. Meanwhile, a Chinese orbiter called Chang'E 2 has now left the Moon and is journeying to a point in space where the gravitational attraction of Earth and Sun balance out, called L2. This is new territory for the Chinese, who have never flown a deep-space mission before. Flying ever inward, we get to Venus, where Venus Express is putting in its own workmanlike performance mapping Venus' clouds and glowing hot surface on a mission that will go on for at least another three years. Finally we get to Mercury. MESSENGER just started its science mission there in March, and it's already completed one Mercury year of observations of the innermost and smallest planet. It's found Mercury to be a world that's strange and different from the Moon, and scientists are now admitting that they just don't understand how it formed. Yet. But MESSENGER's data should help them answer that. This is a typical process in space science -- a very little bit of data about a planet lets scientists come up with all kinds of explanations, and then when a spacecraft goes into orbit the very first data that it returns tells us that most of those explanations are completely wrong. Now comes the long process of understanding what the new data set is telling us. There are a few active spacecraft that I haven't mentioned that are cruising around the inner solar system. Japan's Akatsuki and IKAROS are both in solar orbit; Akatsuki will hopefully return to Venus five or so years from now. A couple of old spacecraft, Deep Impact and ICE, are awaiting further instructions. And then there's the five launches coming up. The first will be Juno, in August, which will be the first solar-powered mission to operate at Jupiter's distance from the Sun. Its mission is to study the inside of Jupiter, so it didn't technically need a camera. But pretty much everyone thought it would be a crime to go to Jupiter and not send back pictures, so there is a camera on Juno that was included expressly for the purpose of sending photos back for the public to see. The camera was built by Malin Space Science Systems, and it was based, oddly, on the design of the camera that the next Mars rover will use to photograph the ground rushing up at it as it lands. Juno won't arrive at Jupiter for five years though. Next to launch will be GRAIL, which is actually two spacecraft designed to study the gravity field of the Moon. That's going up in September, and its mission will be over by this time next year. Then, in November, is Curiosity, the next Mars rover. Spirit and Opportunity were human-sized, but Curiosity is an elephant. It's set to land on Mars next summer. Some time after Curiosity there should be another launch, of the Russian Phobos sample return mission known as Phobos-Grunt, which will also carry a tiny Chinese orbiter to Mars. So that's it, just another routine summer of almost twenty robots exploring the solar system! I'll report again on robotic missions at the beginning of October. Stay tuned to planetary dot org slash blog for the latest news and pictures. This has been Emily Lakdawalla for the Planetary Society. Thank you for listening. End of podcast: 365 Days of Astronomy ===================== The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Astrosphere New Media Association. Audio post-production by Preston Gibson. Bandwidth donated by libsyn.com and wizzard media. 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